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Last week, I went up to the park to see the eclipse. I avoided the viewing event put on by the town in the local park. Instead, I observed it from a hunting platform a resident has set up on the undeveloped land behind the park. On the way up to the back lot, I passed a young Mexican girl standing on her steps looking at the sky through eclipse glasses. ‘Como se dice ‘eclipse’ in Espanol’, I asked her. She looked at me like I was stupid.
‘Eclipso’, she said.
‘?Tienes lunetes de eclipso’, I asked her.
She waved the eclipse glasses at me, said, ‘si’, and popped back into her home.
When I walked by the Australian man’s home, he was standing on the porch with his wife, doing what the Mexican girl had been doing. ‘See anything’, I asked him.
‘Nah’, he said.
Shortly after I bought the park, I asked him how the hell he ended up in the New York North Country. He gestured at his wife, who is Canadian. ‘That’s why’, he said. Every winter, the wife bitches about the way Mike plows the snow and they threaten to move to Australia, but they haven’t moved yet and I enjoy talking to them.
‘I think I can see a small chunk taken out of five O’clock’, I said – ‘But maybe I’m just seeing what I want to see.’
‘Yeeeah’, he said.
‘You know how you say ‘eclipse’ in Spanish?
‘Naaah’.
The hunting blind stood level with the tops of the surrounding trees. The land behind the park is a plateau that Mike brush-hogs once a year. The neighboring farmer had just prepared his fields for corn planting. During the partial eclipse that preceded the main event, the sun looked like a cookie with a bite taken out of it and things on earth looked the way they look on an overcast day. Five minutes before totality, a long small mammal – a mink or a muskrat – walked past a column of the blind that I sat on and wandered into the brush. When the sun was almost entirely occluded, you could see night to the west and sunrise to the east. Then, night travelled across the fields, lingered for four minutes above us like the shadow under an umbrella, and moved toward New England. While it was dark, frogs started peeping. The sun looked like a wedding ring, with a band of light and a jewel-like bump on the top. After the eclipse passed, you could see sunset to the east and sunrise to the west.
When I walked back down to the park, the Mexican girl had come back out of her home and was standing on her steps again. ‘?Quieres comprar lunetes de eclipso’, I asked her, and waved the pair I had in my hands at her. She looked at me like I was a bug.
‘No’, she said, and walked back into her home.
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Most older parks have non-Euclidean systems that bear the burden of history. Mom and pop buy some land, develop some lots. Once those lots are full, they add more, and repeat over the decades. The park is developed through organic growth and neglect. Materials evolve with the times. Schematics of the water, sewer, gas and electrical systems are in Pop’s head.
The Internet was designed in the same way:
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That’s how the storm water system at the park in northern New York was developed. When Mike, the manager at that park, scrapped Mrs. Wilkins’ home last fall, he found that the storm tile under her lot was plugged.[1] The lot flooded and then froze. When kids in the park discovered the ice, they put up hockey goals and knocked a puck around. When the ice melted, Mike cleaned out the storm tile and connected it to the downstream drain. That solved the problem on Mrs. Wilkins’ old lot, but the people farther down got flooded out. When he ripped up the downstream storm tiles, he pulled something that looked like a Dune sandworm from the pipes:
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‘Those root balls are biblical’, he said when he sent me the pictures. ‘There is no way a snake or a jetter could get those out.’
‘Are you sure those are roots’, I asked.
‘Yup.’
The previous owner hired a midget who lived in the park named Lou Ferdinelli to fix the culvert that runs under the road from the park to the main leech field. He told me that Lou was a degenerate. ‘It wasn’t so much him’, the previous owner told me. ‘It was more the people he had over to his house. They were trash.’
‘You think Lou could pull those out’, I asked Mike.
‘Lou ran electrical conduit through the drainage pipe that goes under the road.’
‘He what?’
‘And it’s sitting in the bottom of the pipe, in the storm water.’
‘I heard he is a degenerate.’
‘You know, his wife was normal-sized. Three of the girls were six foot tall. One of the girls was little, and his boy was little, too.’
‘Were the stories about him true?’
‘Yup.’
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The day after the eclipse, Mike found a spring near the place where the tile from Mrs. Wilkins’ lot fed the culvert that went under the road.
‘What the fuck’, I said, when he showed that to me. I was standing in dry shoes on the bank of the trench that Mike and his helper had dug. Mike was in the trench, wearing muck boots. The spring bubbled up from a point halfway down the bank like quicksand, or an artesian well.
‘Yeah, heh’, he said.
‘It must be all the water that collects from the hill’, I said. That was a dumb thing to say – there is no place else that water could come from – but Mike was kind. ‘Yup’, he said.
‘What can you do about it?’
‘I’ll show you.’
His first fix was to run a six-inch PVC pipe through the existing drainage tiles that he could not dig up. He perforated the top of the pipe and covered it with a sleeve of landscape cloth. The idea was to have the water from the spring drop into the new pipe and, from there, to be directed to the culvert. He and his helper were working on that when I got into my car and headed home.
(Mike’s helper is named Henry. Henry has long hair, a high voice, and a very gentle manner. He is not skilled, but he is extremely gung-ho. A month ago, when I stopped by the park, I heard him say ‘Ten-four’, so I asked him if he used CB radios. He said, ‘No. I was in the Marine Corps.’ That surprised me, because Henry has the mien of a forty-five-year-old man who blew his mind on acid. He is the least Marine-like person I have met. When I saw him standing in the bottom of the trench with Mike the day after the eclipse, I said, ‘Semper fi’ and he responded, without missing a beat, ‘Do or die’.)
The next day, it rained. Mike called me to say that his fix had not worked. ‘There’s too much water’, he said. ‘The pipe can’t handle what comes out of that spring’.
‘So, what are you going to do’, I asked.
‘Dig a catch basin. The outflow can go into the culvert.’
Two days after that, Mike called me again. ‘How is the catch basin coming’, I asked him. I was sitting in a dry room in front of a computer. It was raining in the North Country.
‘Mrs. Roosevelt drove by’, he said. ‘She told me you work me too hard.’
Mrs. Roosevelt is an old lady who lives in a home near one of the entrances to the park with her husband. She works as a lunch lady at the local elementary school and leers at Mike when he works. I tell her that what she does is sexual harassment at its best. Her first name is – I swear to God – Eleanor.
‘If it is raining, take the day off’, I said.
‘I couldn’t dig the catch basin’, he said.
‘Why not?’
‘It wouldn’t pitch right.’
‘So, what did you do?’
‘I put in a reverse leach field.’
A regular leach field consists of a sewer pipe that feeds three branch pipes or ‘fingers’ that are perforated on their under-sides. Sewage travels down the length of the fingers and leaches into the ground, where it is eaten by microbes. If your septic system is designed well, the pipes are gravity fed. If it is overly complicated, the shit has to be pumped uphill. By a ‘reverse leach field’, Mike meant that he dug below the mouth of the spring, put in a bed of gravel and then laid down three fingers that were perforated on top. The fingers fed a single pipe that fed the culvert that led under the road to a local wetland.
‘When they put in the storm drain, they didn’t even cement the pipes’, he said. ‘That’s how the roots got in, between the sections. And they didn’t clean it out for decades.’
‘You can’t fix stupid.’
‘Nope.’
I glanced at the Patek Philippe watch that I was preserving for the next generation. ‘How is the new fix working’, I asked.
‘It’s wet, but better than it was.’
‘Better is better.’
‘Yup.’
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At a bar in town on Monday night, I sat between two couples from Pennsylvania who had come to see the eclipse. Both were of the age when one suddenly has both time and money, a bucket-list and fewer years to check the boxes. When the waitress gave me my beer, I asked her loudly, ‘Hey – you want to buy some eclipse glasses?’. Both couples exploded in laughter.
‘You remind me of a childhood friend’, the lady sitting next to me said.
‘I hope that friend doesn’t owe you money’, I said.
‘The next eclipse will be May 1, 2079’, the lady’s husband said. ‘I won’t be here for it’.
‘Morning or afternoon’, I said. ‘National Grid is coming to replace a telephone pole on my property in the afternoon.’
‘You live here’, she asked.
‘I own some property in town. It’s a shit-hole.’
‘Does it make money?’
‘So far, so good.’
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Faulkner said that the past is not forgotten. It is not even past. If you dig up a cubic yard of dirt in an older park, you will run into the past. It’s not forgotten and its not past – it is causing floods, short circuits and septic back-ups now. When the next eclipse comes, I will be a hundred fifteen. By that time, I hope, Mike will have excavated the entire park and replaced the shoddy infrastructure with simply-designed systems put together with good workmanship. I won’t be able to do much but smile at my trophy wife. But I might be able to sell a pile of eclipse glasses.[2]
[1] Mrs. Wilkins was the resident who could be in Tennessee and upstate New York simultaneously.
[2] Profiteering contracts entered into under duress are enforceable in Texas courts. Batsakis v. Demotsis, 226 S.W.2d 673 (Tex. Civ. App. 1949).